Week 10: Turning Point

 

Michael just finished up coaching Ruth’s first baseball team. ‘Coaching’ 4-year-olds is something.

Dave came crashing back to Earth last week after his meteoric rise from week 2 to 9, but he HAS officially kept this run long enough to secure his longest hot streak of his Floored career (6-weeks). I’m sure this will be going onto his LinkedIn profile. Dean is the biggest gainer with Dave’s drop, but a number of other underperforming teams bounced back this week.

Holy Cory, Robert, and Dean. It’s not the first time we’ve had three EWWs above 9 in one week, but they are certainly eye-popping. Even more interesting is that they did this with below-league-average Plate Appearances this week. It’s been very interesting that hitting volume isn’t nearly as important as pitching volume. If your hitters are having a good week, those extra 25 PAs you may be spotting your opponent really don’t matter. Michael’s -4.01 WOE this week isn’t THE unluckiest number this year (Kevin had a -5.95 back in week 4), but Michael does now own two of the worst 4 WOE’s this year. Despite having a passable team (5^th in power ranks), Michael is sinking to the bottom of the Standings as the boat has taken on water with a second major wave of injuries, more on this later.

Last week’s blog was heavy analytics, let’s go the other direction this week, MATCHUP RECAPS.

Let’s start with the best team of the week, Cory, as he wholloped Michael even as Michael had a very strong 8.01 EWW of his own. Cory was hitting .350 for most of the week before a ‘slower’ weekend where he only hit .270, but he made up for it with 17 RBIs on Sunday to snipe a category from Michael that Michael had been counting on. Michael benched hitters on Sunday to preserve hitting Ks…which worked, but Michael lost RBIs in the process, luckily (for Michael’s sanity) even with a full lineup Michael would not have won the RBI category. Cory did all this even with swallowing a second Jesus Luzardo blowup. Cory’s tandem of Aaron Judge and Pete Alonso is more than most of our teams are going be able to keep up with. Watch out for this team. Michael had weathered a rough April (like a number of us) with injuries to a number of strong contributors, but the injury bug has hit again and forced Michael to make tough decisions on names like Anthony Santander and Pablo Lopez. Even with an aggressive Pablo cut, Michael was still not able to keep up with Cory’s pitching volume this week. Michael will need to find the balance ASAP or else the trade deadline will be coming up fast.

The next star of the week saw Robert, whose team was clearly fired up after the blog last week, roar back with a huge 14 HR, .309 AVG week. It was Robert’s best EWW week by a full 2.00 points this week, yet another team putting their best foot forward against the one of the other tough luck team this year, Kevin. Kevin’s -8.8 WOE this year, year to date, is third only to Cory and Michael who are both worse than -13.0 YTD. Think of this number like the luck metric, the lower it is, the fewer wins you have in the standings compared to how good your team has been. But back to the matchup. Robert got off to a hot start with Kerry Carpenter’s 3-HR game on Monday, and never really looked back. Kevin had rough starts from Ryan Yarbrough, Matthew Liberatore, and Landon Knack, and just wasn’t able to recover.

Dean took down Keith because Keith was clearly distracted outbidding Michael for Arthur’s players again. So much so, that Keith has even changed his team name for, I’m pretty sure, is the first time ever. I’m flattered. Dean had a huge week across the board with 13 HRs and a 3.36 ERA over 83 innings, while Keith pitched well, but only hit 7 HRs with a .229 AVG. Dean has surged from being 9^th in the power ranks through week 2, up to 3^rd place now, while his Yahoo Standing has stayed strong at number 1. His team is in a very good place to make a run this summer. Keith has been heading the other direction lately. Acquisitions of Freeman and Yamamato will help. Hat tip to Keith for going for it, we’ll see if he goes full-Max by trade-deadline’s end.

Dave, even in a down week, was still the 5^th best team in the league this week, but he was not enough to take down Max in a very tight matchup. Max missed an opportunity to pick up some more quality starts with a big NW, ERA, and WHIP advantage he built up. He even had a QS on the bench on Saturday…though he also had two terrible pitching outings there too and he may have lost his ratios with them starting. So, win some lose some. Dave will chalk this one up to a down week and hope that his team can recover to extend this record-hot-streak of his.

Finally, Paul held off Arthur with a matchup that had 4 category ties. An odd combination of 5 quality starts but -3 net wins for both teams had some bad luck from Paul who had a good 3.79 ERA. Net Wins continues to be an enigma as Arthur's 4.92 ERA had the same totals. I’ll save the next NW rant for another time. Arthur struggled to a .187 AVG but he hit 10 HRs to keep his offensive output afloat. Arthur has begun a sell-off, but I think he still could be a buyer at the deadline, if the deal is right. His power rank had been competitive until two weeks ago, meaning that it can bounce right back with a few good weeks. Paul remains a top-end team but has also gone through a couple of down weeks after peaking in 2^nd place in the power ranks through week 7.

It's a bit of a turning point for the league. Dave, Cory, and Dean have asserted themselves as the teams to beat right now as Paul, Kevin, Keith, and Michael have taken a turn south. The trade deadline is still far enough away to not force any decisions but the free agent wire has really thinned out, not having much help lately. It’s time for us all to make our move.